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In the swampy heat of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Lolo Jones peers at a line of approaching rain clouds. The rumble of thunder carries across the track at Louisiana State University, where Jones is training for her second run at an Olympic gold medal. Jones entered the 2008 Games in Beijing as the favorite to win the 100-meter hurdles, but in the final race she clipped a hurdle and ended up finishing seventh. A lifetime of training evaporated with one error.

When it comes to this summer’s Games in London, she’s leaving nothing to chance.

Jones is attended by 22 scientists and technicians, paid for by Red Bull, her sponsor. It is her seventh training session with the team, and today they’ve arrayed 40 motion-capture cameras along the track. She’s also being monitored by a system called Optojump, which measures the exact location and duration of Jones’ contact with the rubberized surface on every step and after every hurdle. And a high-speed Phantom Flex camera rigged next to the track can zoom alongside Jones and film her at 1,500 frames a second. The Red Bull team calibrates the equipment while Jones warms up.

As sports go, hurdling is incredibly technical. A runner’s raw speed has to be balanced against her form and technique as she clears the ten 33-inch hurdles. If you’re running too fast and not focusing on your form as you approach a hurdle, you can suddenly find yourself too close to the barrier as you take off, and you’ll hit it—as Jones did in 2008. Jones and her coach, Dennis Shaver, are seeking a deeper understanding of how she runs and how she might be able to adjust her technique to gain an advantage over her competition.

Adam Simpson

AVERAGED OVER THE PAST THREE SUMMER OLYMPICS

(2000,2004,2008)

Rank // Country // Citizens per Medal

1 // Australia // 397,858

2 // Cuba // 426,349

3 // Belarus // 602,317

4 // Holland // 795,169

5 // South Korea // 1,625,319

6 // France // 1,651,577 7

7 // Russia // 1,710,247

8 // Germany // 1,723,224

9 // Great Britain // 1,810,371

10 // Italy // 1,887,651

11 // Ukraine // 1,971,963

12 // USA // 2,845,174

13 // Japan // 5,187,841

14 // China // 18,557,602

*Among top medal-winning teams

— Elise Craig

Just as Jones completes her warm-up, the skies crack wide open. The motion-capture session is washed out—the delicate cameras have to be moved under a tent for protection. As Red Bull’s director of high performance and former US Ski Team sports science director Andy Walshe says, “We’re the only people stupid enough to try and do motion-capture outside like this.” But there’s still the Phantom camera rig, which has no trouble handling the rain. Jones does a series of five sprints down the track, clearing the hurdles with a graceful aggression. The resulting hi-res footage is both beautiful and revealing, showing far more detail about her hurdling than the naked eye could ever see.

Jones and her coach gather with the scientists and watch the video to see how quickly she is getting her lead leg back on the ground after each hurdle. “We discovered that I wasn’t kicking down my front leg as soon as I could,” Jones says. “I’m just trying to get down a little sooner over every hurdle, maybe an inch closer on each one. Over the course of 10 hurdles, that’s 10 inches, and when you’re winning or losing by hundredths of seconds, that’s a lot.”

Richard Kirby, an engineer on the project, ticks off other discoveries. They found that Jones was usually fastest on her fourth or fifth trial, so Shaver increased the length of her warm-up time before races. They discovered that her left side wasn’t as strong and stiff as her right, which caused her to wobble slightly down the track, reducing her speed, so now she’s working to strengthen that side of her body. And they found that sometimes she lands with her center of mass behind her front foot, which for a sprinter is like pumping the brakes.

Almost none of these are things that could be seen even with normal video analysis. Shaver and Jones could have trained forever without noticing them. “A lot of things you don’t know, simply because you can’t measure them,” Kirby says. “Getting data like this puts you in a position to ask intelligent questions.”

For elite athletes, traditional training is no longer enough. To go from great to the best in the world, it’s now essential to optimize every bit of performance, even if the gain is just a hundredth of a second. So in addition to relying on their coaches and teammates, they work with biomechanists, physiologists, psychologists, nutritionists, strength coaches, recovery experts, and statistical analysts. Rather than just eating their Wheaties like Bruce Jenner, they guzzle beet juice before a workout, because their team of nutritionists has determined that the nitrates it contains can improve aerobic exercise performance by as much as 2 percent. They don’t just rub Bengay on tired muscles, they follow elaborate hydrotherapy regimens to limit muscle damage and reduce soreness by 16 percent. And instead of pounding out hour after hour of training, they sometimes do a targeted workout of insanely high intensity, approved by their physiologists, which can give them better results in as little as four minutes.

In short, science has become an integral part of an athlete’s quest to reach new frontiers of accomplishment.

You’ll see the results this summer in London, as competitors push ever closer to the ideal sprint, the flawless swim, the immaculate pole vault. It took evolution millions of years to produce the modern human. Over the past century, coaches have used intuition and discipline to vastly improve athletic performance. Now scientists are taking the last step, helping athletes approach perfection.

On the afternoon of April 10, 1896, 17 men from five countries set out to run the first Olympic marathon. Doctors warned that such an exertion might be extremely dangerous, and in fact only eight of the competitors successfully finished the contest—a Greek horse groom named Spiridon Louis won the race in 2:58:50. In Beijing 112 years later, Kenya’s Samuel Wanjiru won the marathon on a sweltering day with a time of 2:06:32. After not much more than a century, Wanjiru had run his race—more than 2 kilometers longer than Louis’, by the way—29 percent faster.

Adam Simpson

American diver Marjorie Gestring, age 13 years, 268 days, became the youngest individual gold medalist ever when she won the 3-meter springboard event at the 1936 Berlin Games.

Gymnast Dimitrios Loundras of Greece won bronze in team parallel bars at the age of 10 years, 218 days, at the 1896 Athens Games. He remains the youngest medalist in Olympic history.

Hiroshi Hoketsu of Japan had the longest Olympic career, spanning 44 years. The equestrian participated in the Games in 1964 and 2008.

At 72, Oscar Swahn of Sweden took silver in the team running-deer double-shot event at the 1920 Antwerp Olympics, making him the oldest medal winner ever. He is also the oldest gold medalist of all time.

American Dara Torres is the oldest individual swimming medalist, winning three silvers in the 2008 Beijing Games at the age of 41.

— Jordan Crucchiola

It’s a remarkable change. After all, human beings have been running for the entirety of our existence as a species. Some evolutionary theorists actually believe it was our ability to run for long periods of time that enabled humans to survive—it allowed us to hunt by simply pursuing our prey to exhaustion. The fact that we sweat rather than pant to regulate our body temperature; the way that our legs store energy while we run, almost like springs; even the size of our rear ends—all of these are thought to be adaptations that enable us to run efficiently.

In sport after sport, you can see similar progression in our physical abilities at the most elite level of competition. In swimming, the men’s 100-meter freestyle record has improved 29 percent since 1905. The men’s shot put world record is 49 percent farther now than in 1909. For women, the gains are even greater—some women’s field-event records have improved by more than 100 percent.

But after a century of massive accomplishment, the pace of improvement has slowed dramatically in the past 20 years. From 1905 to 1988, the men’s 100-meter freestyle swimming record dropped an average of 0.32 percent a year. In the 24 years since 1988, it has dropped just 0.13 percent a year. You see the same thing in other sports. The curve is flattening out. In fact, studies suggest that current world records in some track events are approaching their absolute limits and that we might have only a percent or two of improvement left in us.

What happened? We spent the 20th century learning the basic science of human physiology, training, and nutrition. Sport went from an amateur pastime to a worldwide industry worth hundreds of billions of dollars, and millions of new athletes were able to compete. New equipment—from stronger, lighter shoes to drag-reducing swimsuits—radically elevated performance. Our understanding of nutrition led to the development of drinks and foods that ensure that athletes have the fuel they need during events. Strength and conditioning programs meant fewer injuries and more time to train. In 100 years, we developed a cohort of athletes whose physical accomplishments would have been unthinkable four generations earlier.

The challenges of the 21st century are very different. At this point, the easy improvements have all been made. Margins of victory are going to be smaller, and the tools that help athletes win will increasingly be found not in the weight room but in the lab. Many sports will begin to resemble auto racing, where wins are determined by a combination of driving skill and technology.

As sports scientist Giuseppe Lippi wrote in an analysis of world records over time, in the future “athletic performance will be determined less and less by the innate physiology of the athlete, and more and more by scientific and technological advances.” Forget about recruiting the best athletes; if you really want to build a great athletic team, it’s time to recruit the best PhDs.

A lot of those PhDs can be found near the Australian capital of Canberra, on a large campus that looks like a futuristic college attended solely by shockingly fit young people. This is the Australian Institute of Sport, and it’s a global leader in merging science with athletic talent.

AIS was born out of failure: At the 1976 Summer Olympics in Montreal, Australians won just one silver and four bronze medals. Worse yet, its tiny neighbor New Zealand won two gold medals. When Australia’s prime minister at the time toured the Olympic Village, he was booed by the athletes, who felt they hadn’t been given the necessary support.

In the US this might have been greeted with a shrug. In Australia, it was a national scandal. Sports, especially international competition, had long been an important component of Australians’ self-image. As the country grew from its roots as a British penal colony, its new native-born population used sports to carve out an identity. “Sport in general, and Olympic sport in particular, is one of our few chances to shine on an international stage,” said Australian sports historian David Nadel in a newspaper interview.

Adam Simpson

MEN’S LONG JUMP

44 years

Held by: Bob Beamon, USA

Established: 1968, Mexico City

Distance: 8.90 meters

WOMEN’S 200-METER

24 years

Held by: Florence Griffith-Joyner, USA

Established: 1988, Seoul

Time: 21.34 seconds

MEN’S STEEPLECHASE

24 years

Held by: Julius Kariuki, Kenya

Established: 1988, Seoul

Time: 8:05.51

MEN’S SHOT PUT

24 years

Held by: Ulf Timmermann, Germany

Established: 1988, Seoul

Distance: 22.47 meters

MEN’S 400 METER

16 years

Held by: Michael Johnson, USA

Established: 1996, Atlanta

Time: 43.49 seconds

Jordan Crucchiola

To reboot the country’s athletic program, the government decided to create an academy modeled in part on the sports factories of the Eastern Bloc. Throughout the Cold War, the Soviets and other Warsaw Pact countries saw sporting events as an opportunity to demonstrate the superiority of the communist way of life. Nearly every child was tested at an early age, and those who showed particular promise were shipped to the academies, where they trained year-round. (Unfortunately, the athletes were often given performance-enhancing drugs, sometimes without their knowledge.) These programs were funded and closely monitored by the central government.

AIS hoped to capture the intensity and success of the Soviet academies, without going to the same excesses. The idea was simple: Get the best coaches and the best athletes together on a year-round basis, without any distractions, and hope that athletic magic would result.

It worked well. Australia won 14 medals in 1988 and 27 in 1992. Then, in 1993, it was announced that the 2000 Summer Olympic Games would be held in Sydney. Like many host nations, Australia decided that a standout performance was crucial, and athletic funding was radically increased.

There had been a small sports science department at AIS since its founding. But as Australia ramped up for 2000, nearly $20 million was earmarked for research, and that small department became a juggernaut. Rather than smaller studies based around a specific athlete, the scientists were able to take on larger projects that had a profound impact for Australian sports as a whole.

AIS researchers set out to find new ways to wring more performance out of every Australian athlete. They conducted research highlighting the benefits of altitude training for aerobic athletes. They studied techniques to help athletes recover after a workout, from compression garments to hydrotherapy. Scientists at the institute developed an early tracking device called Minimax that allowed for instant motion analysis of athletes during competition. They pioneered programs to identify athletic potential and even to find athletes who might excel at a different sport better suited to their abilities. They developed a blood test for the banned drug EPO before the 2000 Olympics, hoping that a level playing field would benefit Australian athletes.

The results were astonishing. At the Sydney Games, Australia won 58 medals, placing it third in the podium count. That performance was even more stunning on a per capita basis. Australia’s population was a little over 19 million, meaning the country grabbed one medal for every 328,000 citizens. China, which also won 58 medals in 2000, scored one medal for every 21.7 million citizens. “For every swimmer in Australia, there are three swimmers in the USA and 10 in China,” says Bruce Mason, head of aquatic training and research at AIS. “We use technology to help close that gap.”

They’re also using technology to accelerate the training process. In 1993, Anders Ericsson and his colleagues published a paper called “The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance.” The theory developed in the paper—and later popularized by books like Outliers—is that to become truly great at any skill, you need to put in 10,000 hours of focused effort. But at AIS, they’ve hacked that process, targeting just the specific aspects of a sport that make the most difference and helping athletes achieve world-class performance much more quickly. It’s this kind of training that helped sprinters and lifeguards contend for a spot in the Winter Olympics.

— Jordan CrucchiolaAdam Simpson

When the skeleton—a sport that involves hurtling face-first down a bobsled track on a small sled—was reintroduced to the Winter Games, the Aussies had a problem. They had just one female skeleton athlete in the country and no bobsled track. But the team at AIS took that as a challenge: Could they use science to develop a world-class competitor in just a few months?

They determined that one significant predictor of success had nothing to do with the sled itself or even the skill of the pilot. The faster a competitor pushed the sled through the 30-meter start zone before jumping on it, the better they performed. So researchers set up a national testing campaign, looking for women with backgrounds in competitive sports who excelled at the 30-meter sprint. They also evaluated candidates to see how well they responded to feedback and coaching. Eventually, they picked a group of 10 athletes—including track sprinters, a water skier, and several surf lifesavers, an Australian sport that requires sprinting through sand.

The athletes were given access to the best coaching, equipment, and sports science. Every training and competitive run was analyzed and dissected as coaches looked for places to improve start and steering techniques. Specialized strength and conditioning programs targeted the needs of the sport, especially explosive power and sprint speed.

The program was a success: An Australian racer qualified for the Olympics just 18 months after she first saw a sled. Amazingly, she had completed only 220 runs before qualifying. (A typical US skeleton racer makes upwards of 2,000 runs before appearing in the Olympics.)

Adam Simpson

Fiberglass poles Made their vaulting debut in the 1956 Games in Melbourne; by 1964 all pole-vaulters on the podium had made the switch.

Padded mats Replaced sand as a landing surface for high jumpers in the mid-1960s, facilitating a revolutionary jumping technique called the Fosbury Flop.

Hatchet-shaped oars Introduced at the 1992 Barcelona Olympics, the so-called cleaver oars deliver speedier rowing times under most conditions.

Speedo LZR swimsuits Twenty-three of the 25 records that fell in the 2008 Beijing Olympics were broken by swimmers in the suits. They were banned in 2009.

— Elise Craig

Australia’s success has been accompanied by a boom in investment in sports science around the world. The UK, in the run-up to the London Olympics, has been spending about $160 million a year on UK Sport, its own high-performance athletic program. Canada’s “Own the Podium” program spent nearly $100 million in the run-up to the 2010 Winter Games in Vancouver. Qatar has established the Aspire Academy for Sports Excellence in Doha, hiring several AIS alums to help develop the program. And China, hewing to the state-controlled model, has enrolled 360,000 students in 3,000 sports schools across the country.

But there’s at least one major country that hasn’t yet followed the AIS model of centralized athletic training: the United States. There’s very little government funding for research or training—almost all of the US Olympic Committee’s funding comes from corporate sponsorships and individual contributions. Still, the USOC is striving to emulate the best parts of AIS-style training with what money it has. “AIS is simply the jewel of what you’d want a sports system to look like,” says Peter Vint, a director of high performance at the USOC. “They’re the model for countries all around the world.”

It’s not like anyone needed to teach Leisel Jones how to swim. She had competed for Australia in the 2000 Summer Olympics when she was just 15 years old, winning a surprise silver medal in the 100-meter breaststroke. Over the course of two more Olympics she won seven more medals, including three golds, while racking up another 14 World Championships medals. Many consider her to be the greatest breaststroke swimmer ever.

But now, at 26, Jones was trying to accomplish something unprecedented: qualifying for her fourth consecutive Olympics, something no Australian swimmer had ever done. And so she’s come back to AIS for some very focused swimming lessons. The institute’s aquatic facility is a $17 million marvel, with 30 cameras mounted above, around, and under the water and a motorized cart that runs alongside the swimmers to capture data on their strokes. One of the starting blocks is rigged with force plates and motion sensors; a snake of bundled cables runs over the wet deck to a computer with a huge plasma screen for a monitor.

Jones climbs up and takes her mark. Exploding off the block, she extends her arms and enters the water smoothly, taking three strokes before coasting to a stop, climbing out of the pool, and joining a huddle of coaches and scientists gathered around the computer.

Instantly, an image of Jones appears on the plasma monitor. The system maps all of the parameters of the start she’s just performed—the amount of force she pushed with, the angle at which it was applied, her angle of flight through the air, the distance she went before entering the water, the angle of her entry, and her depth under the water.

A swimmer’s speed at the start is the fastest they travel in a race—up to 5 meters per second. (As one coach put it, “The start is about them trying to minimize the loss of velocity.”) For Jones, the trick is managing both how far she goes horizontally (farther is better) and the amount of contact she makes with the water when she hits (less contact reduces water resistance). Those two ideals are in opposition to each other, so the goal is to find the best balance between them.

Mason, the AIS aquatic director and the man who built the system that Jones is using, peers at the screen. “Leisel is leaving the blocks at about negative 20 degrees,” he says. “We’d like to see her pushing off the blocks harder and leaving at a shallower angle, not getting so deep.” If she can adjust her form on the start and make a few small alterations on her turns, he says, she should be able to shave a massive four-tenths of a second from her 100-meter time.

Jones climbs back up on the block to do another start, trying to implement some of the suggestions that the scientists have made. “We’ve always just had the subjective evaluation of coaches,” Mason says. “Now we can give you the objective evaluation of what you’re actually doing—and the feedback is immediate.”

Six months later, Jones did in fact qualify for her fourth Olympic team. There’s some speculation that she might even be the Australian flag bearer at the Games in recognition of the achievement. But for the scientists at AIS, who work so much with data and numbers, one thing stood out most in Jones’ Olympic-qualifying swim. It was the margin by which she made it into the Games: just over four-tenths of a second.

Special projects editor Mark McClusky (@markmcc) wrote about Nike+ in issue 17.07.